Congolese President Joseph Kabila cancelled a visit to see the pope on Monday, a Vatican diplomat and a spokesman for the president said, as clashes continued in the country's restive east."President Kabila has cancelled his trip because of security problems in the east of the country," the Vatican diplomat said.
Kudura Kasongo, a spokesman for the president, saod: "The president has been detained in the DRC by his national agenda."
The fighting caused Kabila to cancel a visit to an EU-Africa summit in Portugal over the weekend.
After rebels loyal to ex-general Laurent Nkunda appeared to gain ground over the weekend, fresh fighting took place early Monday near the strategic village of Mushake in Nord-Kivu province, the Congolese army and the UN peacekeeping mission (MONUC) said.
"There was fighting during the weekend and it's continuing this morning," said MONUC spokeswoman Sylvie van den Wildenberg.
"Mushake is still in the hands of the FARDC (government forces) but Nkunda forces have retaken positions (since Saturday) on a hill two to three kilometres (one to two miles) from there."
But a MONUC military spokesman said the fighting was not intense, an assessment echoed by the government, whose spokesman Prem Tiwari said the army troops were "consolidating their positions."
"We received orders to stop heavy artillery fire here. On the side of Mushake, (the soldiers) pushed back the enemy and are engaging in cleanup operations," said one army officer, Major Omar Hamuli, who spoke from the eastern Congolese village of Kingi.
A rebel spokesman, Rene Abandi, simply said fighting was still taking place around Mushake. He said MONUC was siding with the government.
The clashes come a week after the 25,000-strong army launched a vast offensive against Nkunda loyalists, who number about 4,000.
But the rebel general has so far rejected demands by Kinshasa and the UN to disarm -- and by Washington to surrender and go into exile. Nkunda says he is defending local Tutsis against Hutu rebels from neighbouring Rwanda holed up in the DR Congo since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The renewed violence has fed UN fears for the welfare of tens of thousands of people already displaced by months of unrest.
"MONUC continues to try and convince the population to displace to zones further away from the fighting," van den Wildenberg said.
She cited in particular Kirolirwe, some 50 kilometers northwest of the regional seat of Goma, where 15,000 displaced, mostly Tutsi civilians, are staying at a camp and where MONUC has established a mobile base.
"We insist on the risks facing the population in case the fighting intensifies, even if we obtained guarantees from the army not to use heavy artillery near the camps," MONUC's van den Wildenberg said.
But a number of the civilians say they are neither afraid of the soldiers nor of the rebels, some of whom have family ties with the displaced, UN and humanitarian officials say.
Many are herders and also fear moving their animals to poor grazing lands or to areas where they might encounter Hutu rebels.
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